Revealed: How Lamu residents planned to defraud national govt of Sh137 million
Details of how Lamu County residents planned to defraud the national government of Sh137 million in a fake compensation list can now be revealed.
In March 2023, residents of Lamu County were overjoyed when the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) decided to compensate them for lost fishing grounds which were used in building the Port of Lamu.
KPA went ahead and picked clerks who were trained and asked to collect, verify and validate signatures and bank accounts from 4,734 fisher folks ahead of their compensation for lost fishing grounds due to the construction of the Port of Lamu.
The total compensation would cost KPA Sh1.7 billion. The training facilitated by KPA aims to equip the clerks with the necessary skills to ensure a smooth compensation process.
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“As a clerk it is your responsibility to always ensure that you have the validated list of the fishermen and the agreements for the area you have been allocated,” KPA’s Principal Legal Officer Mr Stephen Kyandih said.
However, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) asked KPA to halt the process as it wanted to go through the list and find out whether all the people registered were genuine fishermen.
EACC even got orders from the court which halted the process after it told the court that it had noted that the listing was marred with a lot of irregularities.
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“In the Application filed in Court, EACC is seeking to have the fraudulent list substituted with the validated list of genuine beneficiaries,” the anti-graft body said in a statement.
The anti-graft body said it had identified beneficiaries, ghost persons in the existing list as well as genuine fishermen who had been left out due to fraudulent practices.
In its calculations EACC said those who are supposed to be eliminated from the list were to be paid Sh137,535,448. EACC further assured that it will ensure that the genuine beneficiaries will be paid.
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